In France, November 1st marks la Toussaint, or All Souls’ Day. On this day set aside to remember the dead, the French lay chrysanthemums on the graves of loved ones. During this year’s Toussaint, pedestrians in the Paris suburb of Bagneux stumbled across an impromptu gravestone engraving that no amount of chrysanthemums could erase. Across the memorial plaque for Ilan Halimi, the young French Jew murdered in 2006, the words “Free Fofana” had been scrawled.
By way of emphasis, the vandals added a swastika and Hitler’s name to their handiwork.
The joining of these words and signs made sense. Youssof Fofana was the ringleader of the aptly named “Gang of Barbarians,” a crew of teenaged thugs who roamed the housing projects in Bagneux. Convinced that Halimi was rich because he was Jewish, Fofana’s group lured the young man into a rendezvous and kidnapped him. For three weeks, while the police fruitlessly searched for Halimi, the barbarians kept themselves busy by torturing him. Exasperated, Fofana finally cut his losses by dumping Halimi’s battered and bloodied body in a neighboring suburb. Rushed to a hospital, Halimi did not live long enough to see its emergency room.
Captured shortly after by the police, Fofana will not live long enough to ever again see beyond his prison walls. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he remains driven by the belief, as he explained to his lawyer in 2007, that the Jews are “pillars of wealth and a danger to humanity.” This he believes is particularly true for Muslims, who “are being murdered everywhere” by Jews. Although recently placed in solitary confinement after assaulting prison guards, Fofana continues to share his opinions with fellow inmates through the window of his cell.
Though tempting, it is impossible to treat the desecration of Halimi’s memorial stele as a one-off. In 2015, vandals shattered the original plaque that had been erected in the same place. More insidiously, as the newspaper Le Monde revealed this week, such vandalism has become commonplace. While the 2012 rampage of Mohamed Merah at Ozar-Hatorah in Toulouse and Amedy Coulibaly’s assault of Hyper-Cacher in 2015 capture the headlines, run-of-the-mill outrages and provocations aimed at French Jews no longer even register in the media.
Exemplifying the new normal, Le Monde recounted the experience of a Jewish family in the Parisian suburb of Noisy-le-Grand. Earlier this year, they began to receive anonymous letters, each containing a single bullet wrapped in a note warning the family that they were marked for death. With the inevitability of Newtonian physics, the threats subsided when the police installed a camera outside the residence, yet resurfaced when the cameras were subsequently removed. In graffiti they spray-painted across the house’s walls, the vandals sang praises to the Islamic State and swore death to the Jews. Feeling besieged and exposed, the family of six ultimately moved to another neighborhood.
According to a report released this year by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF), one-third of all racist acts in France in 2016 were aimed at the country’s Jewish community, which represents just 1 percent of the French population. Compared to 2014, when nearly one half of racist acts were the work of anti-Semites, this seems to mark a welcome decline. But appearances might well be deceiving: the authors of the CRIF report warn that such incidents are increasingly underreported. Many victims, they contend, “no longer bother to report what now seem to be minor instances of anti-Semitism.”
Tragically, the spectacular instances of anti-Semitic terrorism have “raised the bar so high that lesser activities are no longer denounced.” This banalization has bled into language. According to Maurice Dahan, the official in charge of security for Strasbourg’s Jewish community, there has been an “untying of tongues to the point where what was once clearly anti-Semitic has become part of everyday conversation.” As for the virtual world of social media, where anti-Semitic discourse burgeons, it remains largely terra incognita for state and civil organizations attempting to combat it.
Like the foundations to a slowly flooding house, French Jewry is beginning to lean and fissure from the rise of these murky waters. In L’An prochain à Jerusalem? (Next Year in Jerusalem?), published in 2016, the pollster Jérôme Fourquet and sociologist Sylvain Manternach cite a significant uptick in French Jews moving to Israel, as well as a growing number who are now considering such a move. Yet others, determined to remain in France, are circling the wagons. Jewish families are concentrating in certain neighborhoods in Paris and Strasbourg, while the enrollment of students at Jewish schools has now ballooned to 32,000.
What is to be done? Act, and not panic, according to Marc Knobel. A staff historian at CRIF, Knobel rightly insists these trends require a steady and determined response. The stakes could not be higher, he believes, but there is still “time to act.” The measure of success might well be whether the new stele the municipal authorities of Bagneux plan to build for Ilan Halimi escapes the fate of its predecessors.
